Home > Strange Angels (Strange Angels #1)(9)

Strange Angels (Strange Angels #1)(9)
Author: Lili St. Crow, Lilith Saintcrow

Time slowed down, getting all stretchy and elastic. Each step took a century, and by the time the door came into view—just a plain steel door, with those fluorescents noising overhead—the hornets weren’t just crawling through my bones and brain but touching my skin with fleshy little prickling feet.

There was something behind that door, something that smelled of iron and cold darkness, a freezing shiver up the spine. It was like the feeling I got in that broken-down house on the outskirts of Chattanooga, my first job with Dad, right before a poltergeist started throwing little shards of glass hard enough to bury them in rotten drywall with little sounds like puckering lips.

Or like that small podunk in South Carolina where the local voodoo king sent the zombies around because Dad was cutting into his business by breaking the hexes the king had been throwing at people who got in his way—or who wouldn’t give him what he wanted. I’d had to use every scrap of anti-hexing Gran taught me and a few things from our books to break through some of those old, nasty curses, and Dad had lost some serious blood fighting off the zombies. That had been bad.

This feeling was worse. Much, much worse.

Don’t go in there, I wanted to say. There’s something in there. Don’t do it.

He walked down the hall, and the buzzing got so bad it shook everything out of me, the dream running like colored ink on wet paper, and as it receded I struggled to say something, anything, to warn him.

He didn’t even look up. He just kept walking toward that door, and the dream closed down like a camera lens, darkness eating through its edges.

I was still trying to scream when Dad reached out his free hand slowly, like a sleepwalker, and turned the knob. And the darkness behind it laughed and laughed and laughed. . . .

CHAPTER 3

I came awake all at once, with a jolt like five shots of espresso hitting my bloodstream at full speed. The pencil had snapped in my fist, and I was clutching the two broken pieces. My head felt like a bowling ball being cracked by a giant’s fingers, and I moaned and blinked. Gray light coming in through the window was empty, sterile, and infinite.

The house was a still, cold cave.

I pushed myself up, head throbbing and ribs aching. I’d fallen asleep and slid over to the side, my back against the wall and my artist’s pad digging into my stomach. I rubbed what felt like a half-ton of sand out of my eyes and listened for the heater, for the sound of breathing, for the creaks of Dad moving around.

Nothing. And my alarm clock was turned off. I vaguely remembered something noisy happening earlier and me fumbling for it, almost spearing my palm with the broken pencil.

I rolled up out of my mattresses and shuffled barefoot into the hall. The quilt wrapped around my shoulders wouldn’t keep me warm enough. I made my way down to the other bedroom at the end of the hall, the one next to the stairs.

The door was open but the blinds were down. I peered in. Dad’s cot was there, and his metal footlocker. A wooden box sat by the door, Dad’s private box; I didn’t lift the lid. The cot was neatly made, and I thought it hadn’t been slept in. You could always bounce a quarter off Dad’s cot, though, even five minutes after he got up.

No problem. He’s downstairs; he fell asleep over the table again. Or he’s in the living room with the TV on mute, bandaging himself up. Go down and look. You’ll see. He’s there.

My heart knew otherwise. It pounded inside my ribcage, each pulse accompanied by a sick squeeze of pain inside my skull and a flip-flop of my stomach. I made it down the stairs like an old woman, holding on to the icy banister.

Silence like the heavy quilt wrapped around my shoulders.

There were boxes in the living room, and my orange beanbag chair. Dad’s camping chair sat at its usual precise angle to the television. The red eye of the cable box blinked, and I could almost hear it flicking on and off, it was so quiet.

Dad wasn’t in the kitchen. Dirty dishes still piled in the sink, and the house was cold. I shuffled out into the hall and punched the buttons to turn the heater on.

The heat pump soughed into life with a wump. It was so loud in the stillness I jumped, pulling Mom’s sunrise quilt closer around my shoulders. Then I walked slow dream-like down the hall and to the front door, unlocking both deadbolts and yanking it open.

The cold hit me like a hammer, stinging my eyes and robbing the breath from my lungs. The front yard lay under a sheet of white, bits of the broken picket fence buried under mounds of heavy wet snow. The driveway was a pristine carpet.

Dad’s truck was nowhere in sight. The entire neighborhood dozed under its cold, thick blanket.

I think that’s when I knew. I shut the door, locked both deadbolts, and went up the stairs at a stumbling run, my head pounding and my entire body jolted by each footstep. I banged down the hall and into the bathroom, where I slammed the door and started heaving over the toilet. I didn’t produce anything but bile, even though I retched so hard tears squirted hot out of my burning eyes. I stopped long enough to cry, my forehead against the cool white porcelain of the toilet, and then I had to pee so bad I nearly wet myself. While I was sitting on the toilet I had to retch again, so I bent over and tried my best to swallow whatever came up.

I don’t know how long it lasted. By the time it was over I could only think about one thing at a time.

He might come back, I told myself. What if he got stuck in the snow? It happens. He got stuck somewhere. Or something.

Except there wasn’t enough snow for him to get stuck in. The truck was heavy, and it had chains in a box under the passenger’s seat. Dad was too cautious to let something like weather get in the way of an operation. Or in the way of coming back to get me.

   
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